Just 35 seconds after Yale junior forward Vin Hellemeyer score to tie the game, 2-2, Bernakevitch won a one-on-one puck battle in the corner, walked the puck to the doorstep and backhanded it over Cohen to quickly stop the Bulldogs’ rally.

But Bernakevitch didn’t stop there. He scored his second of the period with 8:38 remaining to give Harvard a 4-2 lead.

And in a span of just over four minutes, he’d given the Crimson back its two-goal lead and silenced the sellout crowd of 3,486 at Ingalls.

“I think he’s getting his confidence back,” Pettit said of Bernakevitch. “He knows he can be a dominating force down low. That was great to see.”

Bernakevitch nearly had a natural hat trick in the second period. His one-timer from the top of the right circle with 5:30 left clanged off the crossbar and fell on the blue side of Yale’s goal line before Cohen kicked it out.

The Crimson dominated play in the first period, scoring twice, deflecting two shots off the post, and allowing the Bulldogs only two scoring chances, neither of which resulted in a goal.

Harvard jumped to an early lead just 1:30 into the game when captain Dominic Moore, the game’s leading scorer with four points, bounced a sharp-angle shot off the post and into the cage behind Cohen on the power play.

“There’s definitely the thought of getting on the board early,” Pettit said. “When you do that, your confidence just rises and everyone feels more comfortable on the ice. We’re the ones who want to set the pace of the game, and make them play our game, and we’ve been able to establish that most of this year.”

The Crimson took a 2-0 lead with 35 seconds left in the first period when sophomore center Tom Cavanagh put back Kenny Smith’s shot from the point just five seconds after Yale finished killing off a roughing penalty to defenseman Joe Callahan.

“Harvard had a real edge in the first period,” Taylor said. “The timing of those two goals was very tough for us.”

Harvard 6, Princeton 3

The scores on Friday and Saturday night might have been the same, but the games were very different.

Although Yale kept it close until the final minutes, Princeton was never really in this game. Harvard dominated the Tigers early, storming out to a 4-0 lead and never relenquishing it.

“This is a big victory for us,” Mazzoleni said after watching his team outshoot Princeton, 46-10. “We’ve had a lot of trouble in this building. It hasn’t been real kind to us, so to have a victory here was big for us tonight.”

Mazzoleni told his team after the game that he was pleased to see how many one-on-one puck battles the Crimson won, estimating that the figure was around 70 percent.